The Family Mill Village

In late February, before the virus really hit, we were driving from Atlanta to Richmond and I prevailed upon my carmates to take short detour to the mill village of Saxon, S.C., close to Spartanburg.

Saxon used to be the home of a large textile mill, founded by my mother’s maternal grandfather John Adger Law, in 1900, when he was just 30 years old.   Operations like Saxon Mill, where the local cotton was turned into fabric, were everywhere in the South Carolina upstate in those times, and Law’s mill prospered.  Mill work was grueling and miserable, of course, as one can discern from the 1932 protest song “Weave Room Blues,” but hundreds of small farmers swapped the risks and struggle of rural life for the security of work in the mills, and mill operators like my great-grandfather got rich.  Like every other major institution in the South, the textile mills remained whites only well into the 1960s.  Saxon Mill, like most others of its kind, was surrounded by a community of small homes, owned by the company and populated exclusively by mill workers and their families, and John A. Law (pictured with two of his grandchildren) ran the whole place, mill and village alike, in the manner of a latter-day feudal lord from a big white house on the property.  He sold out in 1945, just four years before his death, and the mill ultimately became a victim of the Carolina Piedmont textile industry’s collapse in the late 20^th century.  In 2006 Law's long-vacant house was demolished, and in 2012, having been dormant for several years, Saxon Mill burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.  

The ripples of John A. Law’s history and fortune were still around when I was a kid, discernible but fading.  One of my earliest memories, from the late sixties, is of being at an old lake house in the North Carolina mountains with my mother and my cousins.  I vaguely recall a massive staircase, a claw-footed tub, and a steep rock path down to the lake.  When I was older I learned that Law had built that house with his textile riches.   And he had used his considerable influence to help make the lake happen, too, displacing a number of small farmers in the process.  I remember that there was some urgency about that childhood visit:  Law’s children – among them my grandmother – were selling the house.  This would be our one and only chance to experience it.  The house at Lake Summit was gone before I ever got to really know it.  A few other remnants of those prosperous times remained – my grandmother’s taste for golf, for example, and a certain patrician polish to her correspondence – but in the main my great-grandfather and his wealth were part of a shrouded past.  I knew he was a Presbyterian minister’s son.  I knew his grandchildren called him “Demi.”  I knew that late in life he had left his wife, Pearl Sibley Law.  A portrait of her hung in my grandmother’s living room.  She had been known as “Granny.”  Beyond that, I didn’t know much.  John A. Law and his world were not a forbidden subject by any means, but nobody seemed especially keen to talk about him.   And until recently I wasn’t especially curious about him myself.   

What got me thinking about John A. Law and Saxon was the work of Carolina novelist Ron Rash.  I started with his wonderful first novel, One Foot in Eden, whose main character is a poor farmer whose land is about to be flooded out for a man-made mountain lake, and he’s moving in to town to work in a mill.  That seemed a familiar storyline.  I learned that Rash spent his early years in another upstate South Carolina town, Chester, where his parents worked in one of the three mills operated there by Colonel Elliott Springs, another South Carolina textile mogul.  By coincidence, Chester is where my mother spent her teenage years.  There was no overlap between her time in Chester and Rash’s, but even if they had been contemporaries, there’s a good chance he and my mother would not have been well-acquainted. She has spoken often of how the community of Chester perfectly embodied the stratified Southern social structure of those times.  There was strict racial segregation, of course, and strict class division among whites themselves:  Mom recalls, with the acidity she reserves for straight talk about what others regard as “the good old days”, that as a member of the local "white glove set" she was not to consort with “lintheads”, the poor whites who worked in the mills.  

Although Rash is best known for his fiction, particularly his novel Serena, early in his career he wrote a book of poems about life in a textile mill village, Eureka Mill, named after the mill where his parents worked in Chester.   In over thirty poems Rash imaginatively recreates just about every angle of the textile mill experience - trading hardscrabble farm life for the security of mill work, a woman injured by machinery and returning to work the same day, religious revivals, brown lung disease, violent fun on Saturday night, muckraking photographers, funerals, union organizers, an interview with Colonel Springs, and on and on.   For this reader the book’s most poignant theme is the loss the workers experience in the transition from farming to claustrophobic industrial work.  This is Rash’s poem “Mill Village”:

Mill houses lined both sides of every road
like boxcars on a track. They were so close
a man could piss off of his own front porch,
hit four houses if he had the wind.

Every time your neighbors had a fight,
then made up in bed as couples do,
came home drunk, played the radio,
you knew, whether or not you wanted to.

So I bought a dimestore picture, a country scene,
built a frame and nailed it on the wall,
no people in it, just a lot of land,
stretching out behind an empty barn.

Sometimes at night if I was feeling low,
I'd stuff my ears with cotton. Then I'd stare
up at that picture like it was a window,
and I was back home listening to the farm.

But what was done was done. Before too long
the weave room jarred the hearing from my ears,
and I got used to living with a crowd.
Before too long I took the picture down.

This poem and many others made me contemplate how many times I had unthinkingly passed Eureka Mill and its village during my Thanksgiving visits to Chester without wondering about the lives within.  Reading Rash’s empathetic rendering of the inner lives of his subjects, poor people feeling trapped and full of longing, set me to wondering more about John A. Law and Saxon. 

The most cursory Google search brought forth a discovery that should not, in retrospect, have been surprising:  in his mill’s early years, Law was an exploiter of child labor.  Reformer  Lewis Hine, celebrated for his photographs that documented the employment of children in textile mills, work that ultimately led to improvements in child labor laws, made a visit to Saxon Mill in 1912.  He never got inside the mill as he had at some other places, but he did capture some memorable outdoor shots, including this one labeled “Eddie Norton, a sweeper in Saxon Mill. Spartanburg, S.C.”  As Hine's photographs reveal, my great-grandfather had a lot of company in this appalling practice, but still . . . "As seen in the photography of Lewis Hine" is not an honor for any business to aspire to.

My newly ignited curiosity also brought me to G.C. Waldrep’s Southern Workers and the Search for Community (2000), a social history of the mill communities in the Spartanburg area, with an emphasis on the solidarity that emerged within them amid adverse conditions.   Law and Saxon Mill make quite a few appearances in Waldrep's accounts of labor/management strife.   He devotes several pages to a 1935 strike by the fledgling union at the mill.   In that section he describes Law thusly: 

John A. Law had always viewed his style of mill management as enlightened paternalism in the most exacting sense of the phrase.   His village was known for good housing, good water, excellent schools, recreational opportunities, and a family atmosphere – all available to any worker and his or her dependents who were willing to acknowledge Law as the sole proprietor of the community in which they lived . . . Law even enforced his paternalism by residency:  He was the only mill owner in Spartanburg County – indeed , one of the few in the textile South – who actually lived in his village . . . Paternalism, however, provided only a thin veneer to cover Law’s hostility toward the union.  Inside the mill, Law’s tactics in dealing with Local 1882 conformed to the paternalistic ideal.   He received the shop committee with unfailing courtesy and willingly discussed every issue they raised, all the while asserting and retaining the ultimate right of total control over both village and factory . . . At no time during the mid-1930s did he ever refuse to deal with union or government representatives.  He simply met with them, behaved like the gentleman he felt himself to be, and then did nothing to address their suggestions, complaints, or demands (90).

In a later discussion of the 1935 strike, Waldrep goes into some depth about a character whose name I vaguely recalled: Marjorie Potwin.   She was a Columbia University grad student when Law met her in New York.  He hired her to come to Saxon as a welfare worker.  In time she became Law’s partner in micromanaging everyday life in Saxon.  She also became his lover, in an affair that Potwin and Law “flaunted”, according to Waldrep.  Things came to a head where Potwin was concerned during the 1935 strike. As Waldrep tells it, although there were many safety and pay issues at stake, the main matter of contention was that the mill community found Potwin overbearing in her attempts to control village life and insisted that she be removed.  Apparently she was the sort of manager who would ride around the mill village on a white horse, hectoring workers she thought were goldbricking to get out of bed and get on the job.  The community hated her. According to Waldrep, the striking Saxon workers “conceived of the conflict holistically” – that is, better wages would only go so far in improving quality of life if life meant living under Marjorie Potwin’s iron hand.   So John A. Law sent her off to a mountain retreat, the strike ended, and he embarked on a slow but determined campaign to remove the labor leaders from Saxon.  And not long after he divorced his wife Pearl, married Potwin, sold the mill, and moved to Connecticut, where he died in 1949.  Pearl lived out her life as a pseudo-dowager in Spartanburg, passing away in 1962, a year before I was born.  Before I read Waldrep I vaguely knew that there was a Miss Potwin who was a homewrecker (in the view of my family), but it was surprising to read of her central role in an episode of Great Depression labor unrest.  

I’m sure that at some point in my childhood I was taken through Saxon, but I don’t remember such a tour.  Our brief drive through the place last February was my first visit there as an adult.   I did not expect to see a thriving place.   The desolate state of the old mills and mill villages of the Carolina Piedmont is well known, and it testifies to the devastating effects of the collapse of a sector of the economy.   I knew already that Ron Rash’s Eureka Mill in Chester has been torn down.   The weave room that deafened and distressed the workers he wrote of has been demolished.  Web pages are devoted to artsy photographs of the disintegrating old mills.  I knew all this, and yet I was still taken aback by the sorry condition of Saxon, South Carolina.   Poor Eddie Norton and the tyrannical Miss Potwin are long gone. What had been John A. Law’s inequitable but thriving fiefdom was now a vision of destitution - the crumbling remains of the mill, decrepit mill village houses, boarded-up shops, a weedy lot where the Law House used to be.  How many of the people living in Saxon now are descendants of mill workers?  Is it still haunted by ghosts of the sort of people Ron Rash wrote of in poems such as "First Shift"?

The four-thirty whistle won’t wake him this morning.
My father’s awake, dreaming of paychecks.
Bedsprings creak in the other bedroom,
my grandfather coughing, my grandmother rising.
Then the clatter of pans, the warm smell of coffee,
the dog at the door, begging for scraps. 

The three of them walk up the hill in the dark,
across the train tracks, past Darby’s Grill.
They pass through the gate where I cannot follow,
except in blood-memory, except in the knowledge
I eat well and I rest on the gift of their labors.